# Hmmm..the boards are truly screwy

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hmmm-the-boards-are-truly-screwy/87291>\
**Category:** About This Message Board\
**Created:** [October 13, 2001, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hmmm-the-boards-are-truly-screwy/87291 "2001-10-13T20:05:36Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![The\_Water\_Method\_Man](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3da27b/32.png) [@The\_Water\_Method\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Water_Method_Man)\
**Post date:** [October 15, 2001, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hmmm-the-boards-are-truly-screwy/87291/41 "2001-10-15T19:19:32Z")

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Just seeing how things are on the east coast.

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**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\
**Post date:** [October 16, 2001, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hmmm-the-boards-are-truly-screwy/87291/42 "2001-10-16T02:00:07Z")

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Wow! I don’t know what ya’ll said to the hamsters, but keep saying it! Much much better!

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**Author:** ![waterj2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/858c86/32.png) [@waterj2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/waterj2)\
**Post date:** [October 16, 2001, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hmmm-the-boards-are-truly-screwy/87291/43 "2001-10-16T02:52:21Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> Whenever I claimed the board was slow I did a traceroute too & there were slow computers on the way to the board but the mods told me that wasn’t what was happening.

You caught flack because you constantly brought up the possibility of a slow connection being the cause of overall slowness, after it had already been explained that it was the amount of users connected and accessing the database that was the cause of over 95% of all slowdowns. I recall posting traceroute data from different times to convince you that the speed of the data travelling from the server to the user did not vary between when the board was slow and when it was fast.

At the time, the database was slower than it is now, and was a huge bottleneck on the whole system, to the extent that no other factors were really relevant to the speed of the board. You seemed rather reluctant to acknowledge that this was the case, and never really posted anything that I saw that showed evidence of a more serious lag anywhere else.

In the current situation, **Anthracite** (and I as well) has observed that the board is slower than usual, even with similar amounts of traffic, according to the “number of users” info displayed on the main page. Thus, the volume of traffic is most likely not the culprit in this case. The internet connection between the server and the user is probably not either, but **Anthracite** , acknowledging this, decided to post some traceroute data in case anyone wanted to look at that angle. Most likely it will just confirm that that’s not where the problem is.

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